Friday, October 31, 2014

I can never decide which of the seasons is my favorite. Spring has it's newness and promise of things to come, summer means fresh vegetables and fruits and lots of time outdoors, winter is snow blanketing ugly places and birds gathering at the feeders. Autumn is just for color. The sky turns that intense blue and the trees put on their best outfits in colors that go so well with that blue sky.

Driving home from NC last weekend, we got to watch the backward progression of autumn color. North Carolina was just at the peak and as we traveled northward, colors became less intense especially on the east side of mountains where the trees endure the weather. Like this stop for a tank of gas in the Virginia mountains, where the color is still holding on my right but faded to mostly browns/burgundy/gold on my left. I'm thinking about a multi-brown yarn with pops of burgundy, gold and green. Possibly woven into a nice warm scarf.

Golds and burgundies on a taupe background on the windward side

Still holding the golds, reds and greens on the leeward side

Yesterday I got fed up with doing all those things on the To Do List, checking them off in such an orderly and efficient manner. So I ran away from home, heading up to Harmony to visit with Lisa and then a back country drive to my favorite diner. The tree beside the diner was stunning! So many possibilities here--deep green/purple yarn with gold, peach and ruby highlights, or white yarn with those same highlights and a snap of purple every so often.

THIS will become carded batts, then handspun yarn in a month or so!

I had to stop at the local supermarket for a few things for dinner tonight, glanced across the street at a defunct business, and found this:

A burnt orange yarn with yellow, red and green tweed? A multicolored yarn with tan tweed?

Color is everywhere! Especially brilliant at this time of year, but it's always there if you know how to look for it. And it's a never-ending source of ideas for yarn and garments.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

NOTE: This was scheduled for posting on Friday but my tablet refused to upload the pix. So here it is on Sunday night!

I have gone on a work/play retreat of sorts. I brought knitting, a spinning wheel, a cross stitch project, and some writing I needed to attend to. On the way here, I accomplished nothing because I had a bout of food poisoning from a restaurant dinner the evening before. I'll not name the restaurant here, but I'll privately disclose the name if you feel you need to know. Let's just say that pre-cooked chicken and long-standing salad greens are not a safe food handling strategy.

By Monday I felt fine though. It's Friday now and I have finished :

Over half of the pound of fiber is spun. There's 8 oz. of dyed superwash and 8 oz. of a blue violet superwash wool, and I'm plying them together for a subtly striped DK yarn. I'll be washing skeins today so I can start another Garden Cardigan (pattern on Ravelry) and work on it during the drive home. Yes, Doug, it's purple and, no, you can't have it. ;-)

The pair of socks I've been picking away at for 6 months. Knit from Cakewalk yarn (sadly now out of business), they are wonderfully soft and comfy.

I've started a pair of mittens to wear while walking on chilly fall and winter mornings. Pattern 23 from Charlene Scurch's Mostly Mittens. Which is not included in the revised edition if you went looking for it. There's plenty of other patterns in the revised edition that are wonderful too! This is an old Flat Feet sock blank that I dug out of the stash and a ball of Regia 4 fadig in natural. I think they'll work well with my pink Ergonomic Earwarmer.

I also had quiet hours to work on a couple of proposals for magazine submissions and to revamp my spinning classes to fit into 1-hour segments. All in all, a very productive week, with no self-imposed deadlines or household requirements to meet. What a pleasurable week....

Thursday, October 16, 2014

So my task this morning was to bake my Hubbard squash--affectionately known as Elephant Squash (see photo)--and freeze it, make applesauce and write the blog.

Step 1: Turn on the oven, get the roasting pan ready.
Step 2: Slice open the squash. Ha! I had to take the meat cleaver to the darn thing, then sweep up all the squash bits that flew around the kitchen counter. I kid you not, these babies have thick skin!
Step 3: Remove seeds, set half the squash in the baking pan, add hot water, roast for an hour (repeat with second half), cool, scrap out golden pulp and pack in freezer containers. Yep, pie for Thanksgiving!

"The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?"

I just had to throw that in there as a reminder of our shrinking wildlife and reckless handling of Mother Earth.

Applesauce is easier. Wash eighteen apples, quarter them, remove the core/seeds. Cut them in chunks into a big soup pot--yes, I include the skins; a Pa Dutch lady told me that the red skins will 'pink up' the applesauce, and it does! Sprinkle apples with a bit of salt, add 3 cups boiling water and simmer for 20-30 minutes till soft (you need to stir them once or twice because the lower apples will cook and leave the top apples still crisp). Run the mess through a food mill. Transfer back to the pot, add sugar/cinnamon/nutmeg/my secret ingredient. Have your canning jars & lids ready, heat the mess and fill the jars. Wait for the lids to pop, meaning that the vacuum seal is complete. Try to keep the applesauce a secret from your youngest son, who will devour a quart in one sitting.

And my Spinzilla 2014 total--4,870 yards (2.75 miles!) of handspun yarn in 7 days. Now I just have to wash it and find a use for all that mileage.

Friday, October 10, 2014

And just for the fun of it, and because I try to include a couple photos in each post, here's the second gradient yarn that I carded, spun and knit into another shawlette. I'm happy with the design I created and I like the size and drape. There's one darker green line that I wish wasn't there, but spinning from a batt of Merino isn't a precise science and these things happen.

I'm not sure I mentioned this before, but I have an article in the latest PLY magazine. I arranged a fiber challenge for our guild two years ago and we had a blast, learning and stretching our skills. So I wrote an article describing our challenge and giving suggestions for designing your own challenge, whether for your guild or your fiber buddies or just for yourself. You should check it out. The entire issue is packed with good stuff.

I've also been helping a new weaver understand her loom and refreshing her warping and weaving skills. What fun it's been! And she has an art degree and understands when I talk color theory or we get going on European artists--I know who she's talking about and which painting she's referencing. It's been so lovely teaching her.

Spinzilla Report: I'm closing in on 3,000 yards with two days left to spin. Can I make 5,000 yards? Go Team Darn Yarn Harmony!

Thursday, October 2, 2014

I have been dealing with tomatoes for a month, along with the other vegetables and berries that came ripe. I have dried tomatoes, made tomato soup, made tomato bean soup, made chicken cacciatore, frozen tomatoes (12 quarts of the little buggers!), and canned some tomato salsa. There are still a few tomatoes on the vine and some green tomatoes in the refrigerator that will become Fried Green Tomatoes this weekend. And the red raspberries started about the same time. Then there was the cleanup of the green beans and other veggies that are done for the year. I finished most of the difficult work this morning, so I only need to keep an eye on the 6 cabbages and the lima beans and carrots. That seems like smooth sailing compared to the vegetable/fruit marathon I've been running this summer!

I've also been playing with spinning and using my own gradient carded batts and those very pretty gradient-dyed rovings that we're seeing everywhere. I started with the batts and wove a scarf (more on that in another post) just to see what would happen. It's gorgeous! Then I spun one of my gradient batts and designed a shawlette to see if my idea of blooming lilacs would work out (again, we'll cover that in another post). Yep, it almost worked but needs a little refinement in the spinning.

While cruising Ravelry to see what others had done with gradient yarns, I noticed that the knitted shawls had ever-decreasing (or ever-increasing, depending on which direction you're knitting) bands of color as the shawl grew outward. And I don't like that. Usually I like asymmetry but not in a shawl or shawlette, it just looks unbalanced to me. So I pulled out a 4 oz. roving that was a little too bright for my taste and spun it up to play with--if it was an abject failure it wouldn't matter because I don't personally care for the colors. This is the shawlette I designed for the yarn:

It's begun at the center and knitted outward and, as you can see, the bands of color are almost equal. How did I do it? Since it was a 4 oz. piece, I decided there was some sort of mathematical progression that related the length of color stripes to the length of the edge. No, I didn't do the math--I hate math!--I just guessed at it. That's why it was an experiment! Anyway, splitting the 4 oz. roving lengthways left me with two 2-oz. pieces. I split one of them again, giving me one 2-oz piece and two 1-oz. pieces.

I spun each separately, washed them and thwacked them to knock some sense into the singles yarn and make it behave, then I started knitting. I used the two 1-oz skeins first, then the 2-oz skein last. Since the color stripes were longer in the 2-oz skein it compensated quite well and the bands of color are almost equal. You could probably play with this a bit more--I wonder how it would work with a 6 oz. or 8 oz. strip of roving?--but it's not going to be me that plays with it.

If anyone decides to play with this idea, please let me know what you discover. It would be a fascinating exploration, and a good excuse to go buy some gradient-dyed roving.